Dive Brief:
- SAP plans to embed Joule, a natural language assistant, across its cloud enterprise portfolio, apps and Business Technology Platform, the company said Tuesday.
- The generative AI tool will help employees sort through and contextualize data throughout multiple systems. Joule will also draw on integrated third-party sources, according to Julia White, executive board member and chief marketing and solutions officer, speaking during a press event.
- SAP will make the assistant generally available later this year through SAP’s applications. It will arrive early next year on SAP’s ERP platform, S/4HANA Cloud.
Dive Insight:
Enterprise technology vendors flooded the first half of the year with generative AI-related announcements. The push toward the technology boosted stock prices and gained public attention.
“Based on external forecasts and our own calculations, we see a potential doubling of our addressable market to $1 trillion by 2028 with AI being a key contributor,” said Christian Klein, CEO of SAP, during the company’s Q2 2023 earnings call in July
Generative AI quickly became a part of the public vernacular, a speed companies now expect from the technology and its ability to deliver value. Enterprises are looking beyond pilots and product previews to get there and vendors are aware of the shift.
“We find ourselves at the beginning of a major cycle of technological innovation,” White said. “We’re rapidly moving past the hype cycle and lots of various pilots into meaningful adoption of generative AI to deliver real value.”
It’s a competitive market with a swarm of incumbents and new players vying for enterprise market share. Nearly every technology company is working on its AI capabilities, Klein said during the call.
SAP partnered with hyperscalers Microsoft, Google and AWS. With Google Cloud, SAP brought the company’s Vertex AI model training and deployment capabilities to its Datasphere data cloud platform, deepening an existing partnership around cloud and AI. The Microsoft partnership centered around bridging the talent gap by leveraging Azure OpenAI Service API and data from SAP to create compelling and targeted job descriptions among other things.
At the same time enterprise technology vendors are investing heavily in AI, almost three-quarters of SaaS providers increased their prices over the last 12 months, according to Vertice data.
SAP announced in July that it was raising annual on-premises support fees by up to 5%, effective Jan. 1, following the company’s decision to boost average support fees by as much as 3.3% in early 2023. Microsoft and Salesforce have also increased prices.
